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The Freedom Riders, Then and Now

Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were
beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later?

By Marian Smith Holmes

Photographs by Eric Etheridge

Smithsonian magazine, February 2009

View More Photos »

After a mob attacked a bus with
protesters in Alabama in 1961, hundreds more joined the cause.

Bettmann / Corbis

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American
History

Movement
Leaders

Civil
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1960s

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Photo Gallery

The Freedom Riders, Then and Now

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Riding to Freedom

In the spring of 1961, black and white civil rights activists rode buses to
protest the segregationist policies of the Deep South.

Related Links

Breach of Peace

Related Books

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom
Riders

by Eric Etheridge
Atlas & Co. (New York), 2008

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial
Justice

by Raymond Arsenault
Oxford University Press (New York), 2006

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years
1954-1963

by Taylor Branch
Simon and Schuster (New York), 1988

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

by John Lewis with Michael D'Orso
Simon and Schuster (New York),
1988

More from Smithsonian.com

Portraits
of Resistance

A
Civil Rights Watershed in Biloxi, Mississippi

On Sunday, May 14, 1961—Mother's Day—scores of angry white people blocked a
Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The
attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed
windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As
smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive,"
somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and
warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed
the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball
bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten
bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus
terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of
more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly
scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision
that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped
around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and
challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor,
provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace:
Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of
Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from
their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on
their experiences.

Etheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders
who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961.
He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval
taking place around him. But he well remembers using one entrance to his
doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the
orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony.

"Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South
African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid
South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.' "

A few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for
Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to
engage his budding photographic skills. During a visit with his parents in
Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State
Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to
open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300
arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something
special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to
the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the
segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist
riders.

Nearly 75 percent of them were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were
black; a quarter, women. Their mug-shot expressions hint at their resolve,
defiance, pride, vulnerability and fear. "I was captivated by these images and
wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find
the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the
Internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked riders down, then
called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have
you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even
think that it still existed."

On Sunday, May 14, 1961—Mother's Day—scores of angry white people blocked a
Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The
attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed
windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As
smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive,"
somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and
warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed
the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball
bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten
bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus
terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of
more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly
scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision
that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped
around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and
challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor,
provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace:
Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of
Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from
their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on
their experiences.

Etheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders
who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961.
He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval
taking place around him. But he well remembers using one entrance to his
doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the
orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony.

"Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South
African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid
South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.' "

A few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for
Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to
engage his budding photographic skills. During a visit with his parents in
Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State
Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to
open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300
arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something
special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to
the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the
segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist
riders.

Nearly 75 percent of them were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were
black; a quarter, women. Their mug-shot expressions hint at their resolve,
defiance, pride, vulnerability and fear. "I was captivated by these images and
wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find
the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the
Internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked riders down, then
called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have
you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even
think that it still existed."

Most of the riders were college students; many, such as the Episcopal
clergymen and contingents of Yale divinity students, had religious affiliations.
Some were active in civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), which initiated the Freedom Rides and was founded in 1942 on Mahatma
Gandhi's principle of nonviolent protest. The goal of the rides, CORE director
James Farmer said as he launched the campaign, was "to create a crisis so that
the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law."

The volunteers, from 40 states, received training in nonviolence tactics.
Those who could not refrain from striking back when pushed, hit, spit on or
doused with liquids while racial epithets rang in their ears were rejected.

As soon as he heard the call for riders, Robert Singleton remembers, he "was
fired up and ready to go." He and his wife, Helen, had both been active in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and they took 12
volunteers with them from California. "The spirit that permeated the air at that
time was not unlike the feeling Barack Obama has rekindled among the youth of
today," says Singleton, now 73 and an economics professor at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles.

Peter Ackerberg, a lawyer who now lives in Minneapolis, said that while he'd
always talked a "big radical game," he had never acted on his convictions. "What
am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?" he recalled
thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, "I was pretty scared," he told
Etheridge. "The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and
so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives." Today, Ackerberg
recalls acquiescing and saying "sir" to a jail official who was "pounding a
blackjack." Soon after, "I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian's]
head and him shrieking; I don't think he ever said 'sir.'"

John Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-ins to desegregate lunch
counters in Nashville, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted. While trying
to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set
upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs. Less than two weeks
later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any
act of violence keep us from our goal," Lewis, a Georgia congressman since 1987
and a celebrated civil rights figure, said recently. "We knew our lives could be
threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back."

As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some
buses to prevent violence. When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot,
police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms
or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used
"colored" facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather
than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they
called "jail, no bail"—a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities. Most of
the 300 riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison
cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets.

"The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there," said Hank Thomas,
a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard
University in Washington, D.C. "We were told to strip naked and then walked down
this long corridor.... I'll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very
dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is
dehumanizing. And that was the whole point."

Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders
slapped by a penal official for failing to call him "sir." An FBI investigation
into the incident concluded that "no one was beaten," she told Etheridge. "That
said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was
eye-opening." When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another,
unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering
into the transport trucks heightened fears. "We imagined every horror including
an ambush by the KKK," rider Carol Silver told Etheridge. To keep up their
spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs.

None of the riders Etheridge spoke with expressed regrets, even though some
would be entangled for years in legal appeals that went all the way to the
Supreme Court (which issued a ruling in 1965 that led to a reversal of the
breach of peace convictions). "It's the right thing to do, to oppose an
oppressive state where wrongs are being done to people," said William Leons, a
University of Toledo professor of anthropology whose father had been killed in
an Austrian concentration camp and whose mother hid refugees during World War
II. "I was aware very much of my parents' involvement in the Nazi resistance,"
he said of his 39-day incarceration as a rider. "[I was] doing what they would
have done."

More than two dozen of the riders Etheridge interviewed went on to become
teachers or professors, and there are eight ministers as well as lawyers, Peace
Corps workers, journalists and politicians. Like Lewis, Bob Filner, of
California, is a congressman. And few former Freedom Riders still practice civil
disobedience. Joan Pleune, 70, of New York City, is a member of the Granny Peace
Brigade; she was arrested two years ago at an anti-Iraq War protest in
Washington, D.C. while "reading the names of the war dead," she says. Theresa
Walker, 80, was arrested in New York City in 2000 during a protest over the
police killing there the year before of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from
Guinea.

Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states
were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it
would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by
fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even
after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation
persisted; still, the "white" and "colored" signs in bus stations across the
South be- gan to come down. The New York Times, which had earlier
criticized the Freedom Riders' "incitement and provocation," acknowledged that
they "started the chain of events which resulted in the new I.C.C. order."

The legacy of the rides "could not have been more poetic," says Robert
Singleton, who connects those events to the election of Barack Obama as
president. Obama was born in August 1961, Singleton notes, just when the riders
were languishing in Mississippi jails and prisons, trying to "break the back of
segregation for all people, but especially for the children. We put ourselves in
harm's way for a child, at the very time he came into this world, who would
become our first black president."

Marian Smith Holmes is an associate editor.
Photographer
Eric Etheridge maintains a Web site, breachofpeace.com, that
publishes information about the Freedom
Riders.

1
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Related topics: American
History Movement
Leaders Civil
Rights 1960s Alabama

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Comments (12)

Hopefuly, an one who reads this will find and watch the excellent documentary
"Freedom Riders" which will come out on the "American Experience" later this
year (?). In it Bobby Kennedy speaks poignantly, saying "we might have a black
President some day."
With our still segregated schools, our southern
Republicans and t bag party, the U S still has many of the same repressive
elements it did back when the freedom riders accomplished so much. Think
National Guard at Kent State, think National Guard in Iraq.
I think the
country has a great amnesia when it comes to honoring and remembering its truly
great movements- like labor, civil rights, etc. We still are not a peaceful
country and I hope the peace movement cvan grow and accomplish as much as did
civil rights. It has to. Yet, real peace activists remain rare in the U.S. Maybe
some day, a group like Jonah House in Baltimore will be recognized as they
should, but for now, there are no magazine articles about them, and the media
finds other "heroes" to put forward. Sad.
This country seems to create an
atmosphere in which its true heroes are assassinated.

Posted by david eberhardt on May 10,2010 | 10:24
AM

I feel sorry for all people that us because of the color of our skin because
Jesus loves us all the same he sees no color just the contents of the heart I
love the people that hate me the most

Posted by melenia adams on February 1,2010 | 09:49
PM

I feel guilty that in the 60's I was in a word, private Catholic schools,
secondary and post secondary, where the Beatles were more popular than Rev.
Martin Luther King jr, who led many freedom marches through the South. I was
about his age. I began to educate myself after his assasination. Since that date
I have read so much about Civil Rights and how we came to be feared by whites
since slavery. I am happy that our history is so open compared to the few
paragraphs I learned in American history from school text books in the 60's. I
read this article and I am awed of our black history. Thank you for putting it
out there.

Posted by Joy R. Rees on February 15,2009 | 05:32
PM

I take offense to the term "paddy wagon". The correct term is "Police Van".
Paddy Wagon is a slur against Irish people. I am not offended by Eric Ethridge
personaly because I'm sure he does not know any better. The term "Paddy Wagon"
came about when the police would send a van in to the town to arrest groups of
drunken citizens, man of which were Irish.

Posted by Joseph Hastings on February 14,2009 |
08:08 AM

There were the Jews, there were the "blacks", there are now the "gays"...
who's next? WHEN will America be what our fore-fathers set out to make it? God
Bless them all. God help those, who hate...

Posted by Diane Lacey on February 13,2009 | 12:35
AM

Cities were a lot safer then. Look at Detroit and how badly deteriorated it
is compared to 50 years ago.

Posted by Bill Elliott on February 12,2009 | 11:28
PM

Couple things. First, One of my professors in college was a Freedom Rider.
But he never told me about his time in the Birmingham jail; I discovered that on
his web site thirty years later. He was a good man. Two, I would suggest that
"massive and instant privilege" (on a World scale at least) could be applied to
almost anyone in the United States (although certainly not all; Black people and
Appalachian whites included), even then. But this was not South Africa; even for
African Americans. Think about if your name was "Kennedy" or "Bush;" It's mostly
a class issue in the end. Three, that life for Black people was no worse in the
South than the North irrespective of press emphasis. The press made much of the
Southern problem but I grew up in Cincinnati, and I saw first hand as much there
as here in Memphis where I have lived for almost 30 years and northeastern
cities such as Boston were even worse. It has been said that the difference in
the Southern and Northern racial view was this: that the South viewed Blacks as
simply inferior; the Northern view on the other hand was vile hatred. One may
eventually prove oneself, but hatred is a completely different matter. I will
never return to Cincinnati.

Posted by Alan Wells on February 8,2009 | 01:46
PM

I subscribe to your magazine and thoroughly enjoy it.And yes, I did read this
article.  An eye opener for sure.Thank you.  EllenPS.  Would it
be possible to obtain one of the World Maps that you give to new
subscribers.  I have been a reader for a number of years and give gifts of
the magazine too.Thanks Ellen

Posted by Ellen Harrington on February 7,2009 |
10:00 PM

WAS 1961 LIGHT YEARS AGO. I WAS BORN AND GREW UP IN BIRMINGHAM BUT BY 1961
WAS LONG GONE FROM THE "PITTSBURG" OF THE SOUTH TO A RURAL TOWN IN NORTH
ALABAMA. I WELL RECALL THE SCREEMING HEAD LINES ABOUT THE "FREEDOM RIDER" AND
HOW THEY WERE INTRUDING INTO OUR LIFE STYLE, AT THAT TIME I THOUGH THAT ANY
AMERICAN SHOULD BE ABLE TO TRAVEL ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND OUR GOVERMENT
PORTECT THEM. I WAS COMPLETELY BENT OUT OF SHAPE WITH BULL CONNOR AND HIS WATER
SQUIDS. AT THAT TIME I WAS BADLY OUT OF STEP WITH REST OF SOCIETY. NOW I AM
CROWED BY POLITICIANS WHO SAY THEY WERE WRONG AND THAT "ANY AMERICAN SCHOULD BE
ABLE TO TRAVE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND BE PROTECTED BY THEIR GOVERNMENT" WHEN I
MOVED TO THIS SMALL TOWN,FROM THAT FAR AWAY FOREIGN CITY OF CHATANOOGA
TENNESSEE, THE BOARD OF REGISTRATION ALMOST DID NOT ALLOW ME TO REGISTER TO
VOTE. THEY THOUGH I MIGHT BE BRINGING IN FOREIGN IDEAS. THE FACT THAT MY WIFES
MOTHER WAS BORN AN RAISED HERE, AND BOTH OF US WERE GRADUATES OF THE STATE
UNIVERSITY HAD NO BEARING ON THE LADY WHO HEADED THE BOARD. WAS ALL OF THIS LIGH
YEAR AWAY, OR WHAT?

Posted by walter vice on February 7,2009 | 01:12
PM

It was so long ago. I was a high school teacher at Kirkland, Washington when
The American Federation of Teachers sent me to Mississippi to set up a freedom
school. I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi in a Greyhound Bus. At Jackson I
marched with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee regional director Stokely
Carmichael and was incarcerated at Mississippi State Fair Ground's main
provillion for ten days and harshly beaten.

I then went to Amite County,
a KKK stronghold, and set up a freedom school and assisted with the registration
of 35 blacks, the first black residents ever registered in that county.

I wrote a lengthy article about my experience focusing on Herbert Lee
and Bob Moses.
I would like to get a copy of my mug shot by the Jackson,
Mississippi police.

Sheridan Peterson
[email-masked]

Posted by Sheridan Peterson on February 1,2009 |
10:59 PM

I read that some of the freedom riders were as young as 16, I was 15 in 1961,
and living in NorthEastern Ohio. There was only one black family in the small
town of Ashtabula, but on the lake front was an old mansion called the Hubbard
House. This was atop a hill above Lake Erie, cna had a tunnel to the beach in
which runaway slaves were taken down to waiting ships in the dark of night.
Thank You for this article which touches on the brave men and women of both
races who had the courage to participate in this daring adventure.

Posted by Steven Cox on January 25,2009 | 09:25
PM

I enjoyed looking over this. However, I enjoy reading the actual magazine
more because I am the type of reader who enjoys holding what he or she is
reading and sitting in a comfortable chair reading it! I look forward to
continuing to read my actual magazine when it comes in the monthly mail. Thanks,
and have a great week! Best wishes, Lee.

Posted by Dr. Lee Prosser on January 24,2009 | 04:03
PM

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